What PDF is
PDF describes a page: glyphs at coordinates, not rows and columns. A table in a PDF is a visual arrangement, not a data structure.
Reports, invoices, statements and anything sent to be read rather than processed.
What MediaWiki is
MediaWiki table markup opens with {| and a class, marks headers with an exclamation mark and rows with |-.
Wikipedia editors and anyone running a MediaWiki install.
What changes when you convert PDF to MediaWiki
Every character in a text-based PDF carries its position on the page. Characters sharing a baseline are one row. Columns are found from the vertical strips no character ever occupies, which is why extraction works cleanly on a document laid out with spacing and badly on one laid out with ruled lines. A header repeated at the top of each page is detected and dropped rather than landing in the middle of the data.
The wikitable class is applied, which is what gives the table borders and header shading on Wikipedia.
What carries over from PDF to MediaWiki
One property of the PDF has no home in MediaWiki, and it is worth knowing which before you convert.
MediaWiki marks its header cells differently from its data cells, so the first row is written with that marker.
Anything visual in the PDF - weight, alignment, colour, column widths - has no counterpart in MediaWiki and is dropped. The values are what survives.
This is the direction that recovers structure: PDF has no table in it to read, only an arrangement that looks like one, so the rows and columns are inferred rather than read.